Jeopardy contestant Amy Schneider jumps to fourth place for highest winnings in regular season play
History-making Jeopardy contestant Amy Schneider is solidifying her spot as one of the game's greats.
After winning 17 games in a row, the Jeopardy champion has now earned the fourth-highest winnings in regular season play. She currently has won $687,400 total, putting her fourth behind Jeopardy icons Matt Amodio ($1,518,601), James Holzhauer ($2,462,216), and top champion Ken Jennings ($2,520,700). She comes in sixth for all-time winnings.
Jeopardy Amy Schneider on "Jeopardy."
Earlier this month, Schneider, an engineering manager in California, previously set a Jeopardy first as the first openly transgender contestant to qualify for the show's special "Tournament of Champions" (she is not the first trans contestant to become a champion on the show; she's the first contestant to make it to the highest level of the competition). The history-making moment came after Schneider won five consecutive games and claimed the title of 10-day champion with a total of $380,200. "I'm not going to pretend I didn't think I could do good, but this has just been so much better than I thought I would do," she said at the time.
After that show ended, Schneider told Jeopardy's Jimmy McGuire in a Winner's Circle interview that as a child growing up in the Midwest in a conservative family, a trans comedian named Natasha Muse — who she became aware of when she moved to San Fransisco — inspired her to embrace her trans identity and pursue competing in the show she's been a lifelong fan of.
"I had gotten kind of a distorted idea of what it meant to be trans," she said. "So seeing her being smart and funny and cool and just a normal person with a normal life and kids and everything like that just showed me that it was something that I could possibly be, and that really made a difference for me."
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